So what’s wrong? Well, where do you start? The need to transition to a plant-based system to counter the climate crisis applies to the oceans as it does to the land. For 20+ years, the MSC has been propping up and providing a sheen of respectability to the fishing industry. The MSC’s “blue tick” certification label now spans 400+ fisheries, representing around 15% of all global fish landings.

There is plenty of money sloshing around this scheme. Fisheries pay fees of $20,000 to $500,000 for an assessment from Conformity Assessment Bodies (CABs). Indeed, the cost of certification ironically often excludes small-scale fisheries from applying. The MSC also charges retailers royalties of up to 0.5% of the net wholesale value of seafood sold, for using its label. Around 80% (£23.6m) of MSC’s funding comes from licensing income.

It’s not difficult to see a glaring conflict of interest. And there have been plenty of people who have pointed out the flaws in the MSC model. If the nets of MSC-certified fisheries had as many gaping holes as the MSC scheme itself, then no fish would be caught in them at all.

Scores of organisations have highlighted that the MSC’s certification process does not properly account for by-catch, particularly of sharks and cetaceans.

For a long while, MSC allowed vessels to catch both certified and non- certified fish in the same fishing trip, with this only dropped after intense pressure from advocacy group, On the Hook. The 2021 documentary, Seaspiracy, particularly had MSC in its sights and the response by the charity was woeful. The film’s director, Ali Tabrizi, questioned the NGO’s independence owing to its funding and is shown repeatedly failing to secure an interview with MSC to answer the criticisms.

There was a backlash to the documentary from the MSC and other industry interests after it was aired. But Seaspiracy wasn’t making up the criticisms. One contributor to the documentary was Callum Roberts, professor of marine conservation at the University of Exeter. He accused MSC of certifying fisheries that had “astounding levels of by-catch” and said the MSC label was not “worth a damn in some cases”.

The fishing industry hides behind the certification, as do the supermarkets, with consumers duped into thinking there is such a thing as sustainable fishing and that the certification means they are doing the right thing.

The MSC needs to actually take the word in its title – “Stewardship” – seriously. It needs to extract itself from the hopelessly flawed symbiotic relationship with the industry. It must accept that sustainable fishing is a contradiction in terms. And it needs to pivot to supporting a fair and just end to fishing as a vital component of a plant-based food system. Until then, Animal Rebellion will expose its hypocrisy at every opportunity.

The post The Marine Stewardship Council: A flawed sheen of respectability for an industry in denial first appeared on Animal Rebellion.

The meat, dairy and fish industries are under threat so are desperately lashing out and it isn’t pretty. There is nowhere for those with vested interests to hide, given the science is now so clearly stacked against them. So they are going on the offensive. All 10 largest meat and dairy companies in the USA “have contributed to efforts to undermine climate-related policies” (Lazarus et al., 2021).

In an interview published on Boxing Day in The Guardian, a Spanish government minister, Alberto Garzón, in charge of consumer affairs, explained that factory farming is damaging the environment and leading to the export of poor-quality meat. Mild stuff and clearly factually correct. 

The backlash has been furious, from the meat industry and politicians, forcing the government to distance itself from his comments.

Fortunately, Garzón has stood his ground. In a subsequent radio interview he said: “I’m not saying anything new. I’m just relaying what scientists say. Everyone knows that the factory farming of meat causes pollution … and emits greenhouse gases.”

In the UK this month, the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) has launched a £1.5 million campaign featuring an inquisitive little girl ‘Nancy’ along with her grandad. Being broadcast on Channel 4, ITV and Sky as well as on-demand services, the new TV advert focuses on the supposed goodness within red meat and dairy. Poor ‘Nancy’.

The AHDB describes itself as “a statutory levy board, funded by farmers, growers and others in the supply chain to help the industry succeed in a rapidly changing world”.

“Survive” might be a more appropriate word than “succeed”. The rapidly changing world is what scares corporations that for so long have trashed the environment, contributed massively to the climate crisis and put out disinformation, while making huge profits and raking in massive taxpayer-funded subsidies. 

That misinformation is nowhere better epitomised than in the Red Tractor consumer logo for pork and pork products. It is not hard to understand the problem when you know that the “standard” behind this logo is from the British Meat Processors Association (BMPA). Talk about marking your own homework.

For mass misinformation under one roof, you can’t beat the industry’s WeEatBalanced website, with its sheen of respectability and faux concern for health and the environment. 

In fact, the weaknesses of the arguments shine through. For instance, in a piece entitled “What would happen if the world converted to veganism” there is basically nothing that can be said to counter all of the benefits of a plant-based diet. 

Here’s the first of five pathetic straws that are clutched at: “Livestock produce much more than just food, from medicines and cosmetics to glue and waterproofing agents, they are in a huge number of products. Consideration hasn’t been taken on the impact of these production processes or the impact of animal-free replacements.” 

Is that the best you can do?!

If the world switched to a plant-based system, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world (Poore & Nemecek, 2018). This was according to a study, published in the journal Science, based on a huge dataset from almost 40,000 farms in 119 countries and covering 40 food products that represent 90% of all that is eaten. It assessed the full impact of these foods, from farm to fork, on land use, climate change emissions, freshwater use and water pollution (eutrophication) and air pollution (acidification). Oddly, this and the many other benefits, don’t feature on the website. 

The global meat industry leaves a trail of destruction all over the world, including climate change, deforestation, forest fires, human rights abuses, land grabs from indigenous people and traditional communities, increased risk of future pandemics like coronavirus, and damaging health.

Joseph Poore, at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the research, said: “A fully plant-based food system “is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use. It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car.” 

There are echoes within the industry fight-back of other sectors that have ended up on the wrong side of history – tobacco and fossil fuels. If the food industry bodies wanted to be useful, they would put all of their efforts into bringing about a fair transition that protects independent farmers and supports the urgent shift to plant-based models. 

Instead, they shout, rant, misinform, and spend millions on lobbying, websites and advertising, as the sun starts to set on them. As Mr Garzón found recently, those that speak out will be attacked but these are the wayward, flailing punches of industries that are down and on their way out. 

What you can do:

Join Animal Rebellion and help us call out the hypocrisy and lies as we have done time and time again in our actions against the likes of McDonald’s, Arla, Red Tractor and others. 

Make a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority (in the UK, this is at https://www.asa.org.uk/make-a-complaint.html)

References:

Lazarus, O., McDermid, S. & Jacquet, J. The climate responsibilities of industrial meat and dairy producers. Climatic Change 165, 30 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03047-7

Nemecek. T and Poore. J, “Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers,” Science 360, issue 6392 (June 2018): 987-992. 

The post Industrial farming: Fighting for its survival first appeared on Animal Rebellion.

Have you heard of super trawlers before?

Super trawlers are massive fishing boats that haphazardly capture, freeze and store thousands of tonnes of fish and other sea life.

They are notorious for wiping out fish stocks and contributing to large scale extermination of dolphins, seahorses, whales, and turtles. But their damage doesn’t stop there.

Most UK fishing rights are currently in the hands of a few elite. FIVE families, all of whom can be found in the Times Rich List own super trawlers and control 29% of the UK’s fishing quota. Unsurprisingly, over half of the 25 top profiting fishing businesses were involved in evading designated quotas during the Black Fish Scandal, worth over £63m.

Supertrawler Margiris fishing in a Marine Designated Zone

The 142-meter super trawler Margiris carries a net the size of 6 football pitches and can capture and preserve 6,000 tonnes of fish. A Greenpeace UK investigation found that Margiris, allowed to enter the English Channel in late September 2018, was operating in a Marine Conservation Zone. It was designated by the UK government in 2016 to protect the seabed in this area which provides a home for undulated ray classed as ‘endangered’. Unfortunately, these aren’t the only creatures threatened in our waters. However, the UK government’s “laissez-faire attitude towards ocean protection” was highlighted clearly by the lack of regulation methods implemented and that Margiris could legally fish in a Marine Conservation Zone.

The removal of damaging activities such as trawling at this scale is not a secret tool for protecting and allowing the recovery of our ocean life and ecosystems. The fact that specific regulations were not enforced allowed a boat of this magnitude to enter the narrow English Channel and to vacuum up 1,610 tonnes of fish.

Must the government wait until the rays, dolphins, bluefin tuna and sea bass all become extinct?

Fishing gear and other plastic pollution

Nets, lines, traps and other gear used for commercial fishing, amount up to more than 55,000 double-decker buses worth of discarded fishing gear! Sea pollutants are everybody’s problem — unfortunately (or fortunately) seas do not have borders and plastic pollution can remain floating in our oceans for decades — affecting all sea life from crustaceans and fish to whales and dolphins. Between 1950 and 2019 entanglements caused by fishing gear increased by 55% and a study found that 70% of macroplastic (larger than 20cm) floating the surface of our seas is fishing related.

Sadly, plastic damage doesn’t just stop at straws jamming in a turtle’s nose or the six-pack rings of beer squeezing and distorting their bodies. A pregnant Baleen Whale was found dead with fishing gear stuck in her filter-feeder system stopping her from moving and eating. A seal was found desperately trying to free herself from a fishing net strangling her neck, all the while making the net tighter and tighter.

How many more fatal sea deaths need to occur for our government to take a stand?!

Bycatch and loss of biodiversity

Super trawlers do not discriminate. They catch anything and everything that enters their path. With nets longer than a football pitch and as tall as a three-storey house, trawlers pick up A LOT of bycatch and illegal fish. The nets are so large there is no actual way to regulate the size of sea mammals and fish from being trapped in the nets. In 2012, with a quarter of her catch illegal, super trawler Maarartje Theadora was fined €595,000.

Some sea-mammals, such as seals, are lured to their deaths whilst searching for food as they swim into the trawler nets in an attempt to catch the small fish trapped in masses. In moments, the supertrawlers suck them in too. These sad fates are not met by seals alone; dolphins, whales and even two species of birds — shy albatross and black-browed albatross — are listed as “vulnerable” under the Commonwealth legislation. Though bycatch can be discarded back into the ocean — they are mostly injured or dead on their return to the sea impacting their stock as well as the wider food web.

Over 340,000 Mola Mola fish are caught as bycatch each year. They have already been ranked as a vulnerable species by the IUCN. Their big-boned structure and tendency to float mid to surface sea level leaves them in danger of being vacuumed into the trawlers. These beautiful fish can be anything from eight to fourteen feet by six/ten feet and weigh 4000 pounds on average.

Let us stand together to demand protection from our government for these endangered and dying species.

Governments large hand in illegal fishing

The European Union (EU) and the Common Fisheries Policy is supposed to prevent illegal fishing. Whilst the EU makes grand and empty statements about stopping illegal, unregulated and overfishing, it is actually part of the larger problem. Subsidies for new fishing facilities, fishing vessels and fuel are handed out to the same corrupt commercial fishing businesses part of the Black Fish Scandal. In truth, without subsidies being recklessly handed out, the fleet of supertrawlers operating across the EU would not be able to operate in profit.

Harmful subsidies are those that “promote overfishing and illegal fishing” which would otherwise be economically impracticable. A report from 2019 suggested that without support from seven international government subsidies 54 per cent of high seas fishing would not be possible; the same report shows that US$20 billion provided by these governments were ‘harmful’. This shows how governments are compensating fuel costs — making it possible for super trawlers to reach the farthest distances of the ocean and destroy habitats, sea life and biodiversity.

The question remains that if governments contribute to the depletion of ocean life, who can we turn to for systematic change? The chief of the World Trade Organisation, Roberto Azevedo, himself said that no one questions the link between government subsidies and the depletion of global fish stocks.

Get to know these earth-destroying supertrawlers:
– Annelies Ilena | 144m long, holds 7,000 tonnes of fish
– Margiris | 142m long, holds 6,000 tonnes of fish
– Cornelis Vrolijk Fzn | Holds 23% of English Fishing Quota
– Franziska | 119m long, depleted Chilean Jack Mackerel in South Pacific between 2007 and 2010
– Helen Mary | 116m long, captures endangered species e.g. hammerhead, sharks, giant rays and dolphins
– Maarartje Theadora | Holds 6,000 tonnes of fish, ¼ of fish caught in 2012 was illegal

The post Supertrawlers: The Boats You Didn’t Know Are Ruining Our Seas first appeared on Animal Rebellion.

As Animal Rebellion activists invite Billingsgate Fish Market into dialogue on the climate crisis and the plight of the the 2.3 trillion marine animals killed every year, we look at this often forgotten victims of our current food system.

It’s easy to forget about fish or to dissociate ourselves from them and them from food, unlike cows, pigs, and sheep, which we see all around us in the landscape. When we order a salmon steak in a nice restaurant, collect a battered cod from the local chippy, or buy our favourite mackerel pate in the supermarket, we’re not usually thinking of these aquatic animals as sentient beings. It’s not often covered in the media that fish are aware of their emotions and can feel pain, though science proves this is the case and it is recognised in EU law. When we do recognise their sentience, however, and we consider the suffering fish are subjected to through the fishing industry, we soon realise how inhumane the process is. Compassion in World Farming is the leading farm welfare charity, which is dedicated to campaigning to end all farming practices. This charity spearheaded a campaign called ‘Rethink Fish’, which explores the starvation and slaughter that fish are at threat of. Alex Lockwood explains how, in order to empty the fish gut, starvation is required for 2–3 days and, unbelievably, they are sometimes left to endure thisfor 2 weeks, or more, until they eventually die. Slaughter methods may involve gassing with carbon dioxide or cutting the gills without stunning, whilst others are left to suffocate in air or on ice. These sentient creatures experience fear and feel the pain of these brutal methods: the suffering endured is unthinkable.

Farmed Fish

Fish farms are on the increase. Known as ‘aquaculture’, these farms are unlike commercial fishing that harvests wild fish, they cultivate both freshwater and saltwater populations. It is true that ‘meat, aquaculture, eggs, and dairy use 83% of the world’s farmland and contribute 56 to 58% of food’s different emissions, despite providing only 37% of our protein and 18% of our calories’. It is also true that we are facing a global fishing crisis: we are over-fishing our oceans. Aquaculture is not improving this situation either, as ‘approximately one quarter of all wild-caught fish are used to make fish feed. This comprises of somewhere between 450 billion and 1 trillion individual fish. In other words, it can take up to 120 wild caught fish to raise a single farmed salmon’. Our oceans do not have an endless supply of marine life and if fishing industries continue in this unsustainable way scientists estimate we will see fishless oceans by 2050.

While media coverage tries to distract us with campaigns against the use of straws, leading us to believe this is the answer to the worldwide plastic pollution problem, a survey from the Ocean Clean-up campaign has revealed it is in fact the fishing industry that contributes 50% of the plastic currently filling up our oceans e.g. fishing nets and other equipment. In an article by Jill Ettinger, she explores the plastic pollution crisis contributed to by the fishing industry and discusses the unintended marine life that becomes trapped in active nets. These animals, known as ‘bycatch’, suffocate in these ‘mile-long webs of plastic’. She goes on to say, ‘overfishing is leading to the rapid decline of marine life as plastic pollution [increases]; some experts estimate that we will see more plastic in the oceans than fish within the next three decades’. It is a well-known fact that plastic does not decompose, it only breaks apart forming microplastics, which is defined as plastic smaller than 5mm. Microplastics reside in both fresh and salt water systems and research shows that 50% of aquatic insects are found to have microplastics inside of them. These microplastics are then consumed by people when they eat seafood. The full extent of harm is not yet understood, but scientists heed strong warnings and are putting a lot of energy and resources into their research. It is estimated that humans who regularly eat seafood may be consuming up to 11,000 plastic fragments per year and, considering the chemicals involved, scientists believe this can only be damaging to the human body. This is not a problem specific to shellfish, as more and more fish are being found to have plastic inside them too.

Aside from the major issue of plastic pollution caused by the fishing industry, it may come as a surprise to know that fish actually produce more methane, measured by the kilo, than land farm animals. According to an article published in Science, by J Poore and T Nemecek (2018), ‘we find that freshwater aquaculture ponds create 0 to 450g of methane per kg of liveweight (for context, enteric fermentation in dairy cows creates 30 to 400 g per kg of liveweight)’ (3). Together with the release of organic effluents or disease treatment chemicals in the water, this indicates that aquaculture is not as sustainable as many believe. Another article in Science, states even ‘the lowest-impact aquaculture systems still exceed emissions of vegetable proteins. This challenges recommendations to expand aquaculture without major innovation in production practices first’.

Inhumane and Unsustainable

It is clear that the fishing industry is inhumane and unsustainable for the planet and we need solutions. It has been proven that wind farms help to regenerate the ocean bed and fish sources. The currently over-farmed fish for aquaculture purposes puts increased pressure on wild fish as we deplete their food sources. Research shows that to have a growing fish population there is a limit on how many tonnes of fish we can catch per year. If we catch slightly more than this limit then we wouldn’t be able to maintain a stable fish population. Shockingly, EU regulations allow the fishing industry to catch around double this recommended amount, to the detriment of our ecosystem. Furthermore, due to lack of policing, the reality is that the fishing industry is going way past these limits and seriously over-fishing our oceans. This is highly unsustainable and our oceans are drying up of marine life, with serious danger of never being able to recuperate. These off shore areas dominated by the fishing industry are prime spots for wind farms. With the reliably high and relatively steady wind speeds, they present the ideal conditions required for wind turbines. Once constructed, the base of the turbines also plays an important part in the regeneration of the ocean bed, serving as a habitat for fish and giving them the opportunity to repopulate.

In summary, the fishing industry is depleting our oceans of marine life and we now know that it is a major player in plastic pollution, being responsible for an incredible 50% in our oceans worldwide. The inhumanity of fishing practices, which cause pain and suffering to these sentient aquatic animals, is unacceptable. All these issues need to be addressed and public support for radical change is growing. Fish are often ignored so they need our help to amplify their voices, in order to fight with them against this cruel industry and help end their suffering.

The post Where Is the Compassion for Sentient Marine Animals in the Fishing Industry? first appeared on Animal Rebellion.